Swift blazing flag of the regiment,Eagle with crest of red and gold,...These men were born to drill and die.Point for them the virtue of slaughter,Make plain to them the excellence of killingAnd a field where a thousand corpses lie.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Computers were originally just supposed to be number-crunchers, but now their number-crunching has been harnessed in a thousand im...aginative ways to create new virtual machines, such as video games and word processors, in which the underlying number-crunching is almost invisible, and in which new powers seem quite magical. Our brains, similarly, weren't designed (except for some very recent peripheral organs) for word processing, but now a large portion--perhaps even the lion's share--of the activity that takes place in adult human brains is involved in a sort of word processing: speech production and comprehension, and the serial rehearsal and rearrangement of linguistic items, or better, their neural surrogates. And these activities magnify and transform the underlying hardware powers in ways that seem (from the "outside") quite magical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A seashell should be the crest of England, not only because it represents a power built on the waves, but also the hard finish of ...the men. The Englishman is finished like a cowry or a murex.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the c...rest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The man who had died looked nakedly on life, and saw a vast resoluteness everywhere flinging itself up in stormy or subtle wave-cr...ests.... always the man who had died saw not the bird alone, but the short, sharp wave of life of which the bird was the crest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Here is what sometimes happened to me: after spending the first part of the night at my desk--that part when night trudges heavily... uphill--I would emerge from the trance of my task at the exact moment when night had reached the summit and was teetering on that crest, ready to roll down into the haze of dawn....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »